J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 366
May 13, 2018
Teresa Nielsen Hayden (2005): Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space
Weekend Reading: Teresa Nielsen Hayden (2005): Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space: "Getting online just gets easier and easier...
...It���s an inescapable truth that for some people, the most interesting way to participate in online discourse is to kick holes in the conversation. Others���many of them young, but some, alas, old enough to know better���have a sense of entitlement that leads them to believe that their having an opinion means the rest of us are obliged to listen to it. Still others plainly get off on verbally abusing others, and seek out conversations that will offer them opportunities to do so. And so on and so forth: the whole online bestiary:
[Jay Allen:] Must all good things come to an end due to the network effect and the shadow of anonymity?... Discuss all of the things that exposure and user-submitted content might bring and how to mitigate its effect on your site���s health and growth.
Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space:
There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.
Once you have a well-established online conversation space, with enough regulars to explain the local mores to newcomers, they���ll do a lot of the policing themselves.
You own the space. You host the conversation. You don���t own the community. Respect their needs. For instance, if you���re going away for a while, don���t shut down your comment area. Give them an open thread to play with, so they���ll still be there when you get back.
Message persistence rewards people who write good comments.
Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.
Civil speech and impassioned speech are not opposed and mutually exclusive sets. Being interesting trumps any amount of conventional politeness.
Things to cherish: Your regulars. A sense of community. Real expertise. Genuine engagement with the subject under discussion. Outstanding performances. Helping others. Cooperation in maintenance of a good conversation. Taking the time to teach newbies the ropes. All these things should be rewarded with your attention and praise. And if you get a particularly good comment, consider adding it to the original post.
Grant more lenience to participants who are only part-time jerks, as long as they���re valuable the rest of the time.
If you judge that a post is offensive, upsetting, or just plain unpleasant, it���s important to get rid of it, or at least make it hard to read. Do it as quickly as possible. There���s no more useless advice than to tell people to just ignore such things. We can���t. We automatically read what falls under our eyes.
Another important rule: You can let one jeering, unpleasant jerk hang around for a while, but the minute you get two or more of them egging each other on, they both have to go, and all their recent messages with them. There are others like them prowling the net, looking for just that kind of situation. More of them will turn up, and they���ll encourage each other to behave more and more outrageously. Kill them quickly and have no regrets.
You can���t automate intelligence. In theory, systems like Slashdot���s ought to work better than they do. Maintaining a conversation is a task for human beings.
Disemvowelling works. Consider it.
If someone you���ve disemvowelled comes back and behaves, forgive and forget their earlier gaffes. You���re acting in the service of civility, not abstract justice...."
#shouldread
#weekendreading
#publicsphere
May 12, 2018
Dan Ziblatt (2012): Moderation and Radicalization in Cons...
Dan Ziblatt (2012): Moderation and Radicalization in Conservative Parties: "While we may be correct to assert that 'theories of parties' predict establishment candidates win primaries, this is really a theory about the U.S, particularly... the... Republican Party...
...This... looks different in different countries and different time periods, especially with great consequences in ���parties of the right.���... In 19th century Britain, the party leadership nearly always won these kinds of internal battles, giving rise, I would argue to a relatively moderate Tory Party that made its peace with democrac.... In other parties of the ���right,��� insurgents often beat traditional party leaders in these same kinds of battles in late 19th century.�� In��[Imperial] Germany and Weimar... traditional parties of the right were usurped by ���grassroots��� and usually right-wing radicals, making German conservative parties persistent opponents of democracy....��When ���insurgents��� won in parties of the right in Europe���s past, democracy suffered.... While I think you are correct that the establishment candidates will win, it is of course always possible the balance of power in the U.S. Republican Party could change over time���leading, I would argue, to its radicalization...
#shouldread
#history
#arepublicifyoucankeepit
Gabrielle Coppola: Trump���s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Mi...
Gabrielle Coppola: Trump���s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.���s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...
...The motorcycle maker���s decision to shutter its factory in Kansas City and build a plant in Thailand was the ���Plan B��� that Harley turned to after the U.S. abandoned a trade pact with a bloc of 11 countries mostly in Asia, CEO Matt Levatich said in a phone interview. ���We would rather not make the investment in that facility, but that���s what���s necessary to access a very important market. It is a direct example of how trade policies could help this company, but we have to get on with our work to grow the business by any means possible, and that���s what we���re doing.��� Harley will cut about 260 jobs as it shifts production from Missouri to its factory in York, Pennsylvania, amid a deepening U.S. demand slump...
#shouldread
#globalization
#orangehairedbaboons
The extremely intelligent Martin Wolf reviews Maria Mazzu...
The extremely intelligent Martin Wolf reviews Maria Mazzucato. I blush to say that her book is still in THE PILE���I have not read it yet: Martin Wolf: Who creates a nation���s economic value?: "Who creates value? Who extracts value? Who destroys value?...
...If we mistake those who do the second or third for those who do the first, or mistake those who do the first for those who do the second or third, we will end up with impoverished and unhappy societies, in which plunderers rule. Many advanced western countries, in particular the US and Britain, have already reached that state, according to Mariana Mazzucato. The consequences of this, including soaring inequality and declining growth are already visible, argues the author.... An obvious example is the way the financial sector generated a huge increase in household debt in the years leading to the financial crisis of 2007-09. This funded zero-sum competition to buy the existing housing stock at soaring prices. Its legacy included a huge crisis, a debt overhang, weak growth and political disenchantment. Yet, for those who created, manipulated and sold this debt, it was a gold mine. This represented value extraction and destruction.... Much the same picture can be seen in asset management, with its excessive trading, exorbitant fees, lack of transparency, poor stewardship and conflicts of interest. This financial sector, together with the ���shareholder value maximisation��� that economists have promoted, has had a malign effect on the corporate sector as a whole, argues Mazzucato....
That it is hard to see much wider economic benefit from the massive increase in the relative size and influence of finance over the past half century seems self-evident.... If this is success, what might failure look like?...
Mazzucato also attacks... information technology and pharmaceuticals... the award of overly generous or simply unjustifiable rights to intellectual property....
A fundamental thesis... is that mistaking value extraction for value creation, and vice versa, has its roots in the errors of economists.... In Mazzucato���s view the evident failings of our economies are a consequence of our inability to distinguish among activities that create, redistribute and destroy value.... What I would have liked to see far more of, however, is a probing investigation of when and how governments add value. The US government, for example, has played an extraordinary role in innovation....
The book has three significant strengths. First, Mazzucato pushes us to get away from the simplistic creed that markets are always good and governments always bad. Second, she offers the Left a positive goal of prosperity-inducing innovation rather than a sterile and ultimately destructive politics of resentment and redistribution. Finally, she forces us to ask ourselves what adds value to society and how to create an economic and social order that promotes that. The book itself adds value by forcing us to confront these points.
#shouldread
#politicaleconomy
#rentseekingsociety
OK, Ben: how do we write regulations that constrain aggre...
OK, Ben: how do we write regulations that constrain aggregators that want to hack our brain and attention and empower platforms that enable us to accomplish what we prudently judge our purposes to be when we are in our best selves? How was it that printing managed to, eventually, generate a less-unhealthy public sphere? Young Habermas, where are you now that we need you?: Ben Thompson: Tech���s Two Philosophies: "Apple and Microsoft, the two 'bicycle of the mind��� companies'... had broadly similar business models... platforms...
...Google and Facebook, on the other hand, are products of the Internet, and the Internet leads not to platforms but to aggregators.... The business model follows from these fundamental differences: a platform provider has no room for ads, because the primary function of a platform is provide a stage for the applications that users actually need to shine. Aggregators, on the other hand, particularly Google and Facebook, deal in information, and ads are simply another type of information. Moreover, because the critical point of differentiation for aggregators is the number of users on their platform, advertising is the only possible business model; there is no more important feature when it comes to widespread adoption than being ���free.���... Google and Facebook have always been predicated on doing things for the user, just as Microsoft and Apple have been built on enabling users and developers to make things completely unforeseen....
Google and Facebook are fundamentally more dangerous: collective action is traditionally the domain of governments, the best form of which is bounded by the popular will. Google and Facebook, on the other hand, are accountable to no one. Both deserve all of the recent scrutiny they have attracted, and arguably deserve more. That scrutiny, though, and whatever regulations that result, must keep in mind this philosophical divide: platforms that create new possibilities���and not just Apple and Microsoft!���are the single most important economic force when it comes to countering the oncoming wave of computers doing people���s jobs, and lazily written regulation that targets aggregators but constricts platforms will inevitably do more harm than good.... Companies like Apple and Amazon can, as I noted, win in the long run by offering a superior user experience, but more importantly.... Discontent is a greenfield of opportunities to build new businesses and new jobs alleviating that discontent. For that we need platforms on which to build those businesses, and yes, we will need artificial intelligence to do things for us so we have the time.
#shouldread
And now David Brooks decides that it is time for him to t...
And now David Brooks decides that it is time for him to triangulate by making false, flimsy, and flagrantly spurious pro-Trump arguments: Yastreblansky: No More Mister Nice Blog: It takes a thief: "David F. Brooks finally starting to give in to his inner sycophant, as he contemplates Donald Trump's and Michael Cohen's histories with organized crime. Maybe it's a feature-not-a bug!...
...The Brooks hypothesis is that just as it takes a thief to catch a thief, so it takes somebody who's practiced on Fat Tony Salerno to equip a chap to deal with Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Trumpian triumphs of recent weeks demonstrate that. Not that Brooks is advocating the Trump doctrine!
Please don���t take this as an endorsement of the Trump foreign policy. I���d feel a lot better if Trump showed some awareness of the complexity of the systems he���s disrupting, and the possibly cataclysmic unintended consequences. But there is some lizard wisdom here.
It's just the Douthat electric slide: "I'm not saying, I'm just saying."...
Brooks cites��Thomas L. Friedman��as saying Trump's battle with China is "a fight worth having", but not Friedman's comment that Trump's doing it completely wrong....
The Revolutionary Guards who didn't even try to conceal their glee in the leadup to Trump's [Iran] announcement... and are now congratulating themselves that diplomacy is over (that missile attack on Israel looks like a kind of celebration���"Ding dong, the deal is dead!")...
Apparently it's "elitist" to want everybody to have a good education, or a chance to drink a nice Pinot noir, I suppose because it's asking people to be less like themselves, whether we're talking about our own distressed "white working class" voters or thuggish and fanatical foreign leaders. We should instead attempt to be more like them in dealing with them, thugs when we're talking to North Koreans and insensitive about women and people of color when we're talking to hillbillies. I want to do something with this curious symmetry in Brooks's view of Asian dictators and Appalachian shopkeepers, but it isn't ripe yet.
My own opinion is that it does not take a thief to catch a thief, nor does it take a Trump to catch a Kim. A thief will just steal stuff, and a Trump will just try to figure a way to take a cut from the negotiations (I'm sure he's dreaming of a golf course in the Joseon countryside). The hope that Trump could be qualified to save us just by being such a shitty person is not very well founded.
#shouldread
#acrossthewidemissouri
#betterpresscorps
I agree with Noah Smith that a lot of interesting work is...
I agree with Noah Smith that a lot of interesting work is being done in academic economics���even in macro. I agree with the Economist that academic economists are more-or-less neutralized at best in the public sphere, with bad actors, bad methodology, and bad ideologues drowning out information. I agree that economics should do a much better job of policing its own internal community and standing within it via what my colleague Alan Auerbach calls "obloquy". I agree that economics should do a much better job of managing its discursive modes, in both empirical and theoretical work. But I do wish the Economist would turn its microscope on what purports to be economic journalism more: Noah Smith: OK, so The Economist has an ongoing series of articles about the shortcomings of the economics profession: "https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21740403-first-series-columns-professions-shortcomings-economists...
...I'm going to go ahead and write about it before it's finished, so hopefully the later installments will be better than the first three! The Economist's articles each contain some useful background knowledge about a field of econ, and they are better than the Standard British Econ Critique that gets repeatedly dished out (https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-25/critics-of-economics-are-dwelling-in-the-past). But that's about all I can say for them. Let's take the first one, which is about economic growth (really, development). The thesis is that economists don't understand the causes of long-run growth. That is true!! Most development and growth economists will cheerfully admit that they don't know what makes countries go from poor to rich.... Most development economists are agnostic about the Big Question of what makes countries go from poor to rich, and spend their time researching relatively modest interventions that can be used to make countries a little bit less poor.
Nor does the article do justice to many of the theories it does mention.For example, its problem with the Solow model is that we don't understand what the Solow residual is. If that were the only problem, the Solow model would still be incredibly powerful! Growth accounting is summarily dismissed, again because we don't know what the residual is. Again, the implication seems to be that if a growth theory isn't a Theory of Everything, it's a failure. That explaining some aspects of growth, but not others, is useless.... The whole article assumes a self-assurance on the part of growth and development economists that, with a few exceptions, does not actually exist.
Yes, a few people like John Cochrane make wild promises about the growth effects of certain policies. They are rare.
The second article is about business cycle theory. There's really not much in this one, besides a short, informal history of Keynesian, New Classical, and New Keynesian models that won't enlighten anyone who isn't already acquainted with the subject. Macroeconomics is trying a lot of new things - finance-based models, heterogeneous-agent models, search-based models, behavioral models, and quite a lot more. The article does not mention these. Nor does the article suggest a way forward, other than to briefly name-check Minsky and Kindleberger and saying that macroeconomists must "sort out their disagreements" and "come to grips" with their "epistemological woes". There is so much about macro to critique that I'm frankly kind of astonished that this article didn't do much actual critiquing!
The third article, my least favorite of the bunch, is about applied micro. Which the authors seem to think is in a parlous state.... I do appreciate this name-check (though @jamesykwak deserved it more), and it's good that the article talks about the empirical turn in microeconomics.... I'm also glad that this article, unlike the others, actually takes the time to explain a bit about how the research in question actually works! That's great! Though the example of Levitt's abortion-crime study (which turned out to have major problems) isn't the best.
So why does the article say that applied micro is unreliable? Because of the same general critiques of empirical science that are everywhere nowadays: Publication bias, low power, and replication. These critiques are good and useful... in the academic literature. In the public sphere, though, they are often misused. A general attitude of "Don't trust empirical research" has taken hold in some quarters that is lazy, anti-intellectual, and just plain wrong. Publication bias is a problem. BUT, any result will be followed up on by other researchers. Most empirical questions have not ONE paper investigating the question, but MANY....
The article then makes one of the most annoying arguments in journalism, which is to find two conflicting results and conclude that the entire literature is full of conflicting results: Studies finding small or no short-term effects of minimum wage on employment vastly outnumber studies finding big effects, but the article does not mention meta-analysis or the relative quality of the methodologies in question. Waving around papers on publication bias and doing he-said-she-said cherry-picking of empirical results is a GREAT way to get the public not to trust whole literatures full of good, valuable, careful, highly informative research. This kind of thing is not good for anyone. It doesn't help improve the academic literature, and it doesn't help policymakers or the public extract information from the academic literature....
I guess I'm being too nitpicky about these Economist articles. They really are more informed, and more informative, than the average Econ Critique piece coming out of British newspapers. The real problem here is the need to structure every article about the econ profession as a critique. Is there something in British politics that makes it necessary to bash economists to prove you're Very Serious these days? Something about Brexit? Or Corbyn?... Enough grumping...
#shouldread
Will the Trump Fed be "normal"? I will give Ken Randy Qua...
Will the Trump Fed be "normal"? I will give Ken Randy Quarles. I grant Rich Clarida. But Marvin Goodfriend does not seem to me to be a particularly normal Federal Reserve appointment. He's one of the "debasement" crowd who had no respect for Ben Bernanke's judgment and tried as hard as they could to limit his freedom of action. If that's "normal", "normal" is not a good thing. And otherwise... a lot of unfilled seats. I told Jason Furman he needed to fill up the Fed Board on January 4, 2017. He did not do so: Ken Rogoff: Donald Trump���s Normal Fed : "Unfortunately, the battle for the Fed���s independence is far from over...
...Trump may just be keeping his powder dry until a real conflict erupts. Right now, the Fed���s planned interest-rate hikes are largely prophylactic. Inflation is rising only very slowly, even as the economy seems to be running red-hot. But the moment of reckoning could still come. And, assuming that Trump stays healthy, avoids impeachment, and runs again, the last thing he would want in 2019 and 2020 is sharply higher interest rates, an untimely rise in unemployment, and a likely price collapse in his beautiful stock market. In a crunch, the Fed���s much-vaunted independence could prove more fragile than most people realize. It is not enshrined in the US Constitution, and the president and Congress maintain several levers of control. An act of Congress created the Fed in 1913, and in principle Congress could revamp it, say, by greatly increasing congressional oversight, or by starving it of funding. Indeed, from time to time bills have floated around Congress that would have done just that.
For now, Fed appointees have been treated almost as well as generals in the Trump universe. True, with ballooning deficits and the approach of the 2020 election campaign, testing times lie ahead. But for now, let���s acknowledge that this is one area where the Trump presidency has been almost normal���so far...
#shouldread
May 11, 2018
This Year Post-Great Recession America Falls Behind Post-Great Depression America in Recovery
This year, 2018, will be the 11th year after the 2007 business cycle peak that preceded what is generally called the ���Great Recession���. This year American national income per capita will be about 7.5% above its 2007 level. If we are lucky we will hit 10% above 2007 in 2020. That is growth of 0.4% per year���compared to the yardstick of 2.0% per year that we were reasonably expecting back in 2007.
1940 was the 11th year after the 1929 business cycle peak that preceded the Great Depression. Output per capita then relative to 1929 was 10.5% higher. That is growth of 0.95% per year. And output per capita in the 12th year, 1941, was 29% higher than at the 1929 peak���growth of 2.5% per year.
Up until now the disastrous consequences of the financial crisis that started the Great Recession have been first far less dire and then less dire than the disastrous consequences of the financial crisis that started the Great Depression. But this is the year that changes. Now and looking forward, the Great Recession is going to cast a larger shadow on the American economy them the Great Depression did.
But isn���t this the result of the fact that the US government iin 1940 and 1941 found itself facing the Nazis and imperial Japan? In short, no. Subtract all world war two related spending from 1940 1941 and, relative to the previous business cycle peak, in its recovery the Great Depression-era United States would still outstrip us. Defense spending was 1.7% of national income in 1940 and 5.5% of national income in 1941. The true mobilization did not begin until after Pearl Harbor, which came in December 1941.
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